I am periodically gripped by a desire to learn to cook something new. This is an admirable impulse, a virtuous impulse, a laudable impulse, especially at 40—if I were Victorian I’d be the matriarch of two generations; if I were a late-medieval I’d be in my funeral shroud. It is to my credit that I learn new tricks.

That, anyway, is the speech I deliver in a loud stage whisper—hoping that my husband is eavesdropping from the living room—while standing on a wobbly bar stool trying to secure a very large, very pale (very dead) air-chilled duck to a bungee cord tied to the clamp of our toddler’s bouncy swing in the dining-room door frame.

What has led to this scene? The renaissance of Chinese food in America! Dining around New York recently, I have fallen under the spell of excellent dian xin (dim sum) from Hong Kong (at Tim Ho Wan) and Taiwan (at Pinch). I have sampled mouth-tingling mapo tofu from Sichuan, delicate mi fen from Guangxi, and irresistible crossing-the-bridge noodles from Yunnan—at Western Yunnan Crossing Bridge Noodle and the new Yun Nan Flavour Garden, both in Brooklyn. And oh—the subtle Cantonese snacks at Nom Wah! And the American mash-up of psychedelic nightclub and Chinese regional at Mission Chinese Food! (Chong qing chicken wings, tingly sour soup, steak tartare, and caviar service beneath an installation of kites by Jacob Hashimoto, anyone? Yes, please!)

Indeed, the cyclone of interest in all things culinary and Chinese is inescapable. In a single month last fall I received, from assorted publishers, four new Chinese cookbooks, including the excellent Land of Fish and Rice, by Fuchsia Dunlop, exclusively on the cuisine of the lower Yangtze, plus a useful history of Chinese food in America by Anne Mendelson called Chow Chop Suey. An exhibition on Chinese American restaurants—reached through a hanging wall of thousands of Chinese take-out containers—has been on view at Brooklyn’s Museum of Food and Drink for more than a year. As Dunlop tells me, “Twenty years ago, China was still closed off. In the late 1990s, my Sichuan book, Land of Plenty, was rejected by six publishers as ‘too marginal, too regional.’ ” Land of Fish and Rice is her fourth cookbook. “Now people are thinking of Chinese food in a different context,” she says. “Chinese food is on the map.”

My enthusiasm is keeping pace and finding expression in my first sortie on Peking duck. This, to my mind, is the apogee of Chinese food, an estimation that is entirely personal (Dunlop, for example, would probably argue that the apogee is cold jelly in spicy sauce, or eight-treasure stuffed calabash duck). But for me, growing up in New York City in the 1980s, an elaborate Peking-duck dinner was a special event, held annually by my grandfather, who would summon us to a dark room somewhere in Chinatown. The waiters wore tuxedos—or perhaps black suits, though I prefer tuxedos—and Shirley Temples flowed like water. No one in my family recalls the name of the subterranean banquet hall. But I do remember the ghoulish sight of a duck head on a platter, and how, at my first bite, the fragrant skin crackled like Mylar. The silver saucers of Mandarin pancakes seemed bottomless. The hoisin sauce was tart, the scallions curled and crisp. It was perfection.

Luckily I have a recipe in hand, believed to be one of the earliest in writing, from the fourteenth-century Yinshan Zhengyao: The Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink. It is appealingly short—six and a half lines—which makes the whole project seem really quite doable. But then I hit a snag. My shopping list: “duck; ¼ pound onions; 2 ounces of ground coriander; sheep stomach, skin attached . . . ?” I wonder: a) Does my grocery store have sheep stomach?; b) Would a Staub or Le Creuset be better? and c) Should I find a more recent recipe?

But none of my new Chinese cookbooks contains a recipe, not because Peking duck isn’t a classic but because it isn’t as regional and on-trend as, say, Ningbo rice cake. I do find a recipe for Nanjing duck—but Nanjing duck is not Peking duck. A variation on camphor-tea duck from Carolyn Phillips’s All Under Heaven (Ten Speed Press, 2016) sounds likely to produce what I’m after, but it comprises two intimidating pages of text describing cleaning, pressing, massaging, smoking, steaming, and deep frying.

I put all the books away and decide to eat out. I will flood my palate with the flavors and textures for which Chinese food is justly famed. Then perfect Peking duck will come to me instinctively.

One drawback to doing such field work is that it could easily stretch into a week, involving takeout, lunch, and dinner—you really can’t eat anything else if you’re trying to get the lay of the land. As I explain to my husband, in response to his asking if I have given up cooking entirely in lieu of noodles and dumplings, sautéed pea shoots and fried rice, sometimes from several locations in one night: “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” (Sun Tzu—The Art of War, naturally.)

So I can only report highlights, like the tiki cocktails, shrimp toast, and salt-and-pepper dry fry at Kings County Imperial in Brooklyn. You will not, in this terra nova, find the illicit bird’s-nest soup, or the endangered shark fin, described to me wistfully by my duck-loving grandfather. But do not wag your head sadly until you have tasted Madam Zhu’s Spicy Fish Stew at the West Village’s Hao Noodle and Tea by Madam Zhu’s. It is at once deeply pleasurable and deeply painful, and almost sent one of my guests into premature labor. Madam Zhu’s also serves an eight-spice crispy tofu and crispy shrimp sauté that redefine the category of perfect bar snack.

At none of the restaurants I visit or order from do I see chop suey, the dish that originally infatuated Americans with Chinese food. Chop suey is the first true Chinese American dish—a survival mechanism of Chinese immigrant cooks who, having arrived from Guangdong in the nineteenth century, combined ingredients, finely chopped and in hot woks, and served them in restaurants for fellow Chinese immigrants. These stir-fried dishes, which may have included shrimp or chicken or duck or noodles or anything else under the sun, were called chow chop suey (that is phonetic: Chau or chao means “stir-fry”; tsap sui or za sui, “odds and ends”). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, chop-suey houses proliferated, laying the ground for the 50,000 (give or take) Chinese American restaurants that exist in the U.S. today. The reason I don’t encounter much chop suey on my survey is that the restaurants now opening are typically regional, or they represent a new Chinese American that values Sichuan peppercorns and mung beans, Chinese squashes and wood ear mushrooms.

On day eight I realize that I haven’t yet eaten a Peking duck, which would seem to suggest that I’ve lost sight of my aim. I have. But I rectify it by making a reservation at Decoy, Ed Schoenfeld’s temple to the dish on Hudson Street. By making a reservation, one orders a duck and its attendant pancakes and sauces. To make sure we don’t go hungry—our appetites have ballooned after a week of noodles and dumplings—we also order sweet-potato noodles with uni (odd), Kumamoto oysters (delicious), and a New York strip steak (meaty). The duck is the star. It is unimprovable: mostly crisp skin, with thin sheets of velvety meat just beneath. This is precisely what I want to make.

Thankfully, chef Joe Ng is in the kitchen and agrees to let me observe a duck being prepared. This is incredibly helpful, and once I’ve made copious notes, taken several videos, and inadvertently placed a bare hand into a mountain of raw dumpling filling, I feel prepared to re-create his mastery.

Back home the following day, I begin my search for a six- to seven-pound Long Island or Cochin duck. This search is neither interesting to write about nor fruitful, and two days later I plead with a nice saleswoman from a nearby farm to overnight me a headless, air-chilled Alina duck. It arrives, perfectly preserved and on time, looking less ghoulish than what I remembered, missing those vital appendages that remind one that one’s food was recently alive. My first step is to expose it for fifteen seconds to just-below-boiling water so that the skin seizes up. As Ng had explained, sounding a little angry, “The point of Peking duck is the skin; the point of roast duck is meat. Focus on the skin.” I have a large pot, but it seems simpler to put the duck on a rack and pour boiling water over it. I create a deluge, and the next steps have to wait until I’ve finished mopping.

Per my notes: “Then you add salt, pepper, five-spice powder, star anise around the inside. Nothing touches the skin. Then you use a special five-inch metal nail to close the cavity and sew it up.” A second speed bump: I do not have a special five-inch metal nail. I resort to unflavored dental floss and a sewing needle, and after half an hour of stabbing myself, I finally move on to step three, announcing to the empty room: “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle!”

A battle ensues. I have to pump air beneath the duck skin to separate the skin from the meat. There should be a uniform layer of air so that, as the duck roasts, all of its subcutaneous fat drains out, creating that pane-of-glass crackle of which Ng is rightly proud. At Decoy, an electric bike pump is used, and the duck blows up like a parade float in ten seconds flat. I assume that a manual bike pump will suffice, without having fully strategized where I will insert the pump or how to keep the duck from simply being pumped across the room, or whether using our actual bike pump is sanitary. The duck isn’t quite blown across the room, but it shimmies off the counter. I give it a good wipe and turn to the Internet, where food writer J. Kenji López-Alt comfortingly assures me I can separate the skin from the meat perfectly using patience and a chopstick, which I accomplish, I think, with great success. Now I must spoon a mixture of sugar and vinegar over the entire duck with a large spoon.

I am halfway done, and my notes say I need only to “let it hang to dry five to six hours outside or somewhere warm, or ten hours in a fridge.” So it is that I find myself repurposing a baby swing and getting my duck over a heating vent just inside our street-side windows.

I step back to regard my work. To call the scene grim would be stoical. To call it ghastly would be still a bit cool. It is disturbing. My husband wonders aloud if a passerby is more likely to take the hanging duck as a sign of Santería, voodoo, or a satanic ritual. I insist that the duck stay, and go to prepare Mandarin pancakes. Then, a neighbor rings our doorbell to ask if everyone is OK. I sigh the sigh of the weary, unhook the duck, and carry it before me like an offering through the backyard and into our guest house, where, unmolested by inquiring eyes, I empty a refrigerator of its contents and hang the duck by a formidable-looking hook.

The following day, the duck seems just right: slightly darkened, a thin filmy pellicle over its skin, which will help it take on a tantalizing caramel color. (It is painful to report here that my Mandarin pancakes turned into Play-Doh, but I have ingeniously bought fresh flour tortillas as a substitute.) I follow the last of Ng’s instructions: “Turn an oven to 450. Cook 20–25 minutes, lower to 300, then cook until done. The whole duck will be puffed. Put water in the bottom of the oven so you don’t start a fire.” These directions are elementary and give me time to assemble my husband and mother and to recite several moving lines of the Tang-dynasty poem “Ode to the Goose,” substituting duck: “Duck, duck, duck/You bend your neck towards the sky and sing. . . .”

A hush falls over the table as I present my glorious duck. The perfume of star anise rises from its burnished skin. I carve a leg and lay it gently on a platter bedecked with finely shaved scallions and threads of cucumber. Does the skin crackle as Ng promised it would? Has the fat wept away, leaving me only shattering crispness and a velvet blanket of fragrant duck beneath?

No. The duck’s skin is a little rubbery. I need a different pump—and a 20-gallon brew kettle to produce a more consistent caramel brown. And a blowtorch, for . . . just in case. I assemble a full list of needs and equipment, and will begin the diplomatic overtures necessary to begin acquisitions tomorrow. In the meantime, there are Ng’s ducks at Decoy, and at midtown’s new branch of a Beijing-based chain called DaDong, opened in December, specializing in Peking duck. But I may see what can be done with the pump for my yoga ball. To be continued.